Stories of Joseph: Narrative Migrations Between Judaism and Islam (review)

As Michael McGaha shows in his Coat of Many Cultures ( Jewish Publication Society of America, 1997), the story of Joseph is not only one of the most popular and beautiful tales known, but its ability to transcend and intersect the cultures that claim a share in its heritage demonstrates the deeply historically embedded nature of Judaism and Islam. Marc Bernstein’s recent book makes a significant contribution to the study and appreciation of how the story of Joseph has created new historical contexts for the “cross-cultural patterns evidenced in the Judaic and Islamic scriptural and exegetical traditions surrounding the figure of Joseph son of Jacob.”

Bernstein’s work is divided into two parts. The first part consists of a translation of “The Story of Our Master Joseph the Righteous” [Qissah Sayyid-na Yusuf al-Siddiq]. Bernstein provides a readable and careful English translation of a manuscript preserved in a nineteenth-century Judeo-Arabic text found in the Karaite community of Cairo, now housed at the Judah L. Magnes Museum in Berkeley, California. This is a remarkable text, integrating midrashic elements and Quran commentaries in a fashion that belies tacit characterizations of the story as being “Jewish” or “Muslim” in nature. Bernstein shows, through careful documentation of his translation, that the text appears to draw equally on rabbinic and Islamic exegesis in crafting a story of Joseph that discloses the concerns of the communities for which it was produced and in which it was reproduced, read, and kept.

The second part of Bernstein’s work is a creative and original analysis of how the translated text reveals the kind of inter-communal conversation that is too often ignored in favor of a broad-brushed approach to interfaith dialogue or inter-religious conflict. Bernstein argues effectively that the text is not simply a Jewish adaption of a Muslim story, that was in turn adopted from the Bible through the lens of the Quran and Jewish exegesis. It is this insight that allows Bernstein’s analysis to go beyond simple historical tracing of “influences” or cataloguing of narrative and manuscript history. Bernstein is able to highlight significant themes and issues that demonstrate how a shared story, such as that of Joseph, can be used by the historian to understand the dense thicket of culture in which Muslims and Jews were immersed and embedded. Bernstein’s treatment of “Between the Pit and Mrs. Potiphar” is particularly helpful in this regard, showing not only the narrative difficulties of the biblical story and how it was treated by exegetes, but how these narrative glitches could be and were used to produce the distinctive features of different “versions” of the tale.

Readers interested in the Joseph story and in a comparison of Jewish and Islamic exegesis will find Bernstein’s study to provide valuable insights. Perhaps more significantly, readers interested in texts as cultural artifacts illustrating complex living worlds inhabited by people with equally complex historical and primordial ties, should find Bernstein’s work a model of how historians can “read” a text to disclose culture. The rich world produced by the story of Joseph proves not only the shared but pluralistic character of the “biblical heritage” and the Muslims and Jews who construct and inhabit that world.